Protect Your Frequent Flyer Miles From Hackers
According to a new report from Comparitech , a site that compares various tech products, frequent flyer miles are a popular commodity on the dark web .
The company scoured six dark web marketplaces selling stolen goods and information and found hundreds of thousands of points on sale, most notably Delta SkyMiles and British Airways. Comparitech reports:
On Dream Market, one of the largest black markets on the darknet, a single vendor sells bonus points from over a dozen different airline reward programs, including Emirates Skywards, SkyMiles and Asia Miles. Following @UpInTheAir’s pen, they sell a minimum of 100,000 points for the reward program of your choice, starting at $ 884 at the time of writing (it was probably $ 1,000 initially, but bitcoin price fluctuations have caused them to go down).
Unsurprisingly, points’ prices vary from vendor to vendor, although they usually sell for much less than their actual value. For example, Comparitech found 200,000 British Airway points in a $ 45 sale (prices based on bitcoin or Monero, a popular cryptocurrency among criminals).
According to Comparitech, thieves do not use points to travel first class to a beach vacation because, for example, they do not have your ID. Instead, they redeem points online for cash and gift cards. They can also be easily passed on to someone else.
Paul Bischoff, editor of Comparitech, told Marketwatch that this scam is common because it is relatively difficult to detect. “It’s like a credit card fraud in that the victim is unlikely to notice it until they check their account and find that the miles are gone or the thief activates the fraud prevention system,” Bischoff told Marketwatch. People don’t usually check their miles often, which means that theft can go unnoticed for a long period of time, and serious data breaches like the Equifax hack have made it much easier for hackers to find information.
Here are some of Comparitech’s suggestions for protecting your frequent flyer miles:
- Destroy your boarding pass after your flight.
- Never post a photo of your boarding pass online.
- Monitor your account for suspicious activity. If you’re a member of more than one awards program, an app like AwardWallet can help you manage all of your accounts in one place.
- Do not write your airline account number on your baggage tag.
- Avoid using public Wi-Fi to access your account.
And please choose a unique password for your account . Since emails and password information are mostly or readily available to many hackers, you need to make sure that you never reuse passwords across different sites.